We are making an Apple-like slideshow gallery, similar to the one they use on their website to showcase their products. It will be entirely front-end based, no PHP or databases required.

So go ahead and download the example source code and continue with the first step.

Step 1 – XHTML

There is no need for a database nor a PHP back-end for this gallery. This means that it is really easy to incorporate into an existing site – you just have to change a few lines of html code.

Lets take a closer look at the XHTML markup:

demo.htm

The idea is simple – there are two main container DIVs – the one with id=”menu” holds the thumbnails, and the other – “slides” holds the slides themselves.

To add a new slide, you’ll just have to add new elements to both containers. The slides are JPGs, and the thumbnails are transparent PNGs, but you can use any image type you want.

You can even put any kind of HTML in as well. For example you could make a certain slide into a hyperlink by just putting the image inside of an anchor tag.

That said, it is important to have the width and height attributes set up of the slide images – it is used by jQuery to determine the width of the sliding area, as you’ll see in a moment.

Also notice that the thumbnail LI elements. The first one is assigned a class name of fbar , used to only show a vertical dividing bar, and the others are assigned a menuItem class – used as the slideshow control buttons.

Now lets continue with the next step.

Step 2 – CSS

Lets see what lays hidden in our stylesheet. I’ve only included the styles that are directly used by the gallery. You can view the rest of the styles, used to show the demo, in demo.css.

The main idea behind this script is to loop through all the slides, sum up their widths and assign the sum to the slides container – the DIV with the id=”slides“. Because the slides are floated to the left and have enough room, they align next to each other.

Later, when you click a thumbnail, the script calculates which slide to show and scrolls the #slides div by assigning a negative margin via the animate method.

And with just 40 lines of code, the Apple-like slider gallery is finished!